As promised, the review of the first DVD of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. This is likely to be long and overly obsessed with minor details.

The DVD case itself has Haruhi on the front cover holding a lemon. Why a lemon, I do not know. The artstyle resembles Itou Noizi's original rather than Shoko Ikeda's KyoAni version, but this may be incorrect. In any case, the blurb on the back:

I thought that when I entered high school, my days of believing in aliens, time travelers and ESPers were going to be over. That is until she introduced herself. Claiming to be interested in only aliens, time travelers, and ESPers, Haruhi Suzumiya was the strangest girl I've met in a long time…

Before I knew what's going on, I've been dragged into her weird club, and it looks like I'm not the only one who has been drafted into this 'SOS Brigade' of hers, because there are three other students who don't seem to be so ordinary themselves.

Either way we've all found ourselves caught up in Haruhi's quest to search for all things extraordinary. And what's this I hear about us making a movie? http://asosbrigade.com

Colours are approximations. They are also significant, because each one links to another small (circular) icon-sized image: namely Yuki Nagato's introduction in chronological episode 1, a chibi Haruhi doing the famous eyelid-tongue thing, Haruhi in her ouendan male uniform in the opening, Haruhi and Mikuru's first bunnysuit appearance in chronological episode 2, and the SOS emblem (non-reversed). The ASOS Brigade website URL doesn't seem to link to anything else (apart from the obvious).

The cover is not reversible; there's nothing on the flip side. Not that I was really expecting anything there, but one never knows. There's no insert, which I had been expecting, but I suppose the other extras make up for it. The case itself is an Amaray case with the two nubs, which may seem trivially unimportant to anyone who doesn't remember the old Scanavo cases. Yes, those Scanavo cases. If you don't know, be glad. But I digress.

The DVD has four episodes, namely the first "student movie" Episode 00, followed by the first three chronological episodes.

Popping in the DVD and letting it play gives a trailer for The Third (okay anime, not really that interesting as far as I've seen), followed by title screens for Kadokawa and KyoAni (along with a "THIS is how you animate water" sequence) and Bandai and suchlike. Then we get to the DVD menu, pictured above. The background has certain (randomly-chosen) scenes from the three "real" episodes (ie none from Episode 00), which actually synch quite well with the instrumental version of "Bouken Deshou Deshou" playing. (It fades out just before the chorus, and repeats, while the scenes repeat with it.)

Sound is available in English 5.1, Japanese 2.0, and English 2.0. Subtitles are in English or not at all. Trailers, other than for The Third, also include Scrapped Princess (recommended, although I've heard nasty things about the R1 image quality), Eureka Seven (not seen it), and .hack//ROOTS (also not seen it). Extras consist of the textless opening and ending sequences for Episode 00 (that's right, the movie episode, with the "Koi no Mikuru Densetsu" opening and the small thumbnailed ending animations), various Japanese commercials for MoHS (and the making thereof, featuring Aya Hirano), and the first three Adventures Of The ASOS Brigade videos. Also, we have the original Kyon-arguing-with-Haruhi Next Episode Previews. Basically, bliss for the hardcore fan, a bit useless for the more casual sort.

Hitting Scene Select brings us to, well, the scene select, with each episode divided into the Opening, Part A, Part B, the Ending, and the Preview (the Yuki narration version). Music played during this is Hare Hare Yukai, instrumental version, split into four (non-equal) parts (which kind of end by the second time the chorus rolls around).

I've watched the series so many times that within the first few seconds of either Mikuru's so very earnest attempt to sing, or Kyon's monologue about his childhood dreams of an exciting life, I get the same feeling of anticipation, that this will be absolutely and utterly awesome.

In fact, while watching the dub, I was mouthing the Japanese dialogue. I wonder if this makes me a whole other level of pathetic.

I'll talk about the dub in a bit, but I'd like to mention that even if you've watched the series when it was broadcast, it may well be worth it to grab the DVDs anyway, since not only were some scenes redrawn with little details corrected (of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it type; seriously, some of those additions are onscreen for less than a second), but extra scenes were added in, as well as a few miscellaneous bits of dialogue. Most of these extra scenes were little things like the other classmates' reactions to Kyon attempting to engage Haruhi in conversation for the first time, or Kyon checking out the rules for creating a club.

Not to mention that we get, well, DVD-quality. The transfer is pretty good, even if I noticed a few tiny problems, again with blink-and-you'll-miss-it. I suppose it's good enough for someone with my level of skill in spotting image quality.

Now, the dub. Well, the subtitles, in my opinion, needs quite a lot of work; they're often inaccurate, but swinging wildly between too accurate and too literal, leeching all meaning from the dialogue, as well as occasionally simply being wrong. I suppose it doesn't really go that badly in the grand scheme of things, though.

By comparison, the dub script actually isn't bad. Everything gets through as it should, and while it may not be perfect, it gets the job done, quite a bit better than I expected it to. Bonus points for keeping "otaku" and "moe" as they are, although this may confuse very new anime fans.

Going through the voice actors: Stephanie Sheh as Mikuru nails the part down, both sounding like and bringing out the feel of Yuuko Gotou's original performance. Michelle Ruff as Yuki is a bit too robotic, sometimes feeling like she's overdoing it, but is otherwise tolerable. Crispin Freeman does a good Kyon, in that he's able to bring out the sarcasm, but can't quite manage the full range of irritation that Tomokazu Sugita has; he needs less sarcasm and more snark, in other words.

As for Wendee Lee as Haruhi and Johnny Yong Bosch as Itsuki, I'm undecided. They certainly get into the characters, but I'm not sure if their interpretations of the characters actually work, or if they quite fit the characters I had in mind (and this is quite apart from Wendee Lee pronouncing it "mi-KOO-ru", rather than "MI-ku-ru"). It feels like the direction is not quite where I'd expect it to go. Still, in the context of the dub and the dub alone, everything fits perfectly well. (So far.)

So, overall, how would I rate this DVD? From the viewpoint of getting a new convert to Haruhiism, we've got the ever-bizarre Episode 00, which may make or break a great many impressions. After that, we have what may seem like a slightly more sedate generic High School Life anime, which carries on through several brain-warping explanations and a particularly "talky" episode. Then the DVD ends. It's a good stopping point, and if it were up to me I'd make the same decision, but apart from the controversial Episode 00, there's no real "punch". (Well, maybe Episode 00 is all the punch we need.)

One can only imagine the reactions of new viewers come the next chronological episode, especially after the deceptively sedate next episode preview.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under melancholy of haruhi suzumiya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.